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Friday, 07 October 2011

82. 3ds Max Quicktip: SLATE global rendering

Hi All

Hopefully I’ve pushed the benefits of the SLATE Node based material editor at you enough over the past few months, for you to be aware of its strong tools and resultant efficiency. But in the spirit of fairness, its only right I point out its ‘weak’ side. This is strangely around one of its main features though, and it is the ability to use an unlimited amount of material nodes. This obviously means you will get a performance hit on scenes which use a large amount of nodes.

1. Luckily we can easily solve this by turning off the default of global rendering by pressing the CTRL+ALT+U key combination or navigating to the below highlighted field in Slate’s main UI. (Options > Enable Global Rendering).

2. From here you can individually auto-update nodes by pressing the ALT+U shortcut on the selected node. This then allows you to have full control over how many nodes are repeatedly rendered.

Don’t forget the bottom left corner of Slate’s UI will show you what it is doing from a rendering point of view.

Comments

82. 3ds Max Quicktip: SLATE global rendering

Hi All

Hopefully I’ve pushed the benefits of the SLATE Node based material editor at you enough over the past few months, for you to be aware of its strong tools and resultant efficiency. But in the spirit of fairness, its only right I point out its ‘weak’ side. This is strangely around one of its main features though, and it is the ability to use an unlimited amount of material nodes. This obviously means you will get a performance hit on scenes which use a large amount of nodes.

1. Luckily we can easily solve this by turning off the default of global rendering by pressing the CTRL+ALT+U key combination or navigating to the below highlighted field in Slate’s main UI. (Options > Enable Global Rendering).

2. From here you can individually auto-update nodes by pressing the ALT+U shortcut on the selected node. This then allows you to have full control over how many nodes are repeatedly rendered.

Don’t forget the bottom left corner of Slate’s UI will show you what it is doing from a rendering point of view.